Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition State of the Coalition 2023

Martyn Smith

Good morning, friends, and colleagues. I feel almost reluctant to interrupt the flow of conversation and the exchange of ideas you have been sharing in your table discussions. As you will have realized from the headlines and stories you’ve been talking about, the RHSC has had a very productive year.

I felt incredibly lucky and very humbled to have become RHSC’s Director just over a year ago.

A large part of the last 12 months has been about listening and learning. I have spoken directly to several hundred RHSC members during this time and want to thank you all for these candid conversations, taking place in an atmosphere of collegial trust. Likewise, the Executive Committee has been a constant guiding presence, advising and encouraging me as I have navigated a steep learning curve, new lessons, and emerging opportunities.

One of the four priorities I set when I joined the Coalition was ensuring that we engage the full diversity of our wonderful membership. This includes engaging our Implementing Mechanisms where members come together to catalyze creative and innovative solutions to the issues we are facing.

These groups of committed individuals work tirelessly and offer their time and expertise unstintingly. Indeed, without them, I daresay that most of these outcomes you just discussed at your tables would not have occurred. Please take a moment with me to appreciate our Implementing Mechanisms and their various workstreams.

A second and related priority was to undertake a strategy re-design process to carry us beyond 2025 into the next decade. This participatory process, guided by a team of expert consultants, includes the wide range of voices that make up the Coalition, involving deliberate and purposeful country engagement. The re-design includes both a refresh of our existing strategy, as well as opportunities for creativity and innovation. As our membership participates in this Coalition-wide exercise, we look forward to an exciting future and to reporting our progress in a year’s time. Ensuring that the coalition is funded for its core work — central to our mandate.

Thirdly, as you all know the Coalition has more than 570 member agencies from 81 countries; more than a third are based in low- and middle-income countries and many more have a significant presence and mission in those countries. In the last year, the Coalition has built on its ongoing commitment to the principles and practice of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — or DEI. A statement on the RHSC’s commitment to DEI principles can be found on our website. Awareness training, stakeholder interviews, small working groups, and guidance from the Executive Committee will feed into a DEI plan for our People, Processes, Programs, Governance, and Leadership.

And I’m going to keep you waiting to the end of my speech on the 4th priority. Stay tuned!

It’s now my great pleasure to give you a bird’s eye view of some of our key achievements, while reminding you that this is by no means a complete list.

I’ll start by telling you about the landmark year our Global Family Planning Visibility and Analytics Network — or the VAN — has had.

The VAN

— 36 countries now actively use the VAN to engage with market players and raise awareness of funding gaps. The VAN was used to identify a $100 million procurement funding gap across 32 countries and it supported UNFPA and USAID mobilization and allocation of $15.8 million worth of products.

— 100-plus member organizations, and 600 individual users, now rely on the VAN to track in real time more than 7,500 shipments of 71 products across 145 countries.

— 15 West African countries have integrated the VAN into the region’s joint early warning system work, which has helped many product transfers from countries that have enough, to those who are at risk of stockout.

Most of you will know that our work is guided by three drivers of change in the Coalition’s Strategic Framework — Money, Markets, and Movement — or the 3 Ms. Our work in the VAN falls under Movement, in which we seek to improve the passage of products through the supply chain.

Movement

— Also under Movement, the RHSC supports the supply chain leaders of tomorrow under our flagship LAPTOP initiative. This year, we awarded scholarships to 14 young men and 14 young women from low- and middle-income countries to further their studies in supply chain management.

— Under our Girls on the Move internship program with partner Pamela Steele Associates, 36 young women in Kenya completed successful logistics-based placements which culminated in full-time employment for many of the interns.

— Under our Compass Initiative we documented successful supply chain adaptations in sub-Saharan African countries in response to pandemic-related obstacles.

The Second M — Money — represents the resources needed to finance supplies.

— In Peru, we helped grow a private midwife network to more than 1,400 midwives who operate in low-income peri-urban areas. This year, the RIAMA midwife network completed its transition from donor-funding to a self-sustaining network with a revolving fund used to procure affordable contraceptives. This fund has grown by 327%.

— Through our small grants program to support domestic resource mobilization — managed by the Advocacy and Accountability Working Group

— Coalition-supported work in Uganda has resulted in new commitments to allocate almost $6 million to the national medical store to procure sexual and reproductive health commodities in 2022–2023

— In Benin, a national network motivated the Ministry of Finance to increase family planning funding by 20 percent and spend previously committed funds on family planning products.

— We have helped the NGO TAN UX´IL in Guatemala to explore how to provide reproductive health supplies and services to migrant women journeying from Central America to the US border. TAN UX’IL has distributed 2,500 family planning products, 500 emergency contraception pills, and 900 emergency kits containing items such as menstrual health pads.

Markets

Our third M is about fostering healthier sexual and reproductive health Markets for all. Our work in Markets includes improving market intelligence around supplies and building consensus among market players.

— Since 2017, SEPREMI, ForoLAC’s business intelligence tool, has helped Latin American countries strengthen procurement practices and forecast the impact of their investments, achieving $7.9 M in cost savings. Now, ForoLAC has made SEPREMI available in English, opening up the tool’s benefits to 19 English-speaking Caribbean countries.

— In collaboration with CHAI, the Coalition launched a new small grants mechanism this year to increase access to new and underused maternal health medicines for the prevention and treatment of postpartum hemorrhage, including heat-stable carbetocin and tranexamic acid. This catalytic fund will issue 7 to 9 grants, each valued up to $100,000, during the first year of this initiative.

— Through an Innovation Fund grant and the work of the RHSC’s Menstrual Health Supplies Workstream, we helped forge global consensus around the need for quality standards for disposable and reusable menstrual pads. There now exists a groundbreaking roadmap for enforcing quality standards in countries where they exist and for developing them where they do not. Additionally, the International Standards Organization (ISO) established a new technical committee to define standards for menstrual products.

So back to that fourth priority. Fourthly, I focused on the Secretariat Team itself, and I’m delighted that we have welcomed some technically-excellent colleagues who excel at member engagement — Ntindah, Ximena, Daniel, Sarah. I invite the entire RHSC Secretariat team to stand now.

Our hope this week is to ask the big questions and to explore the fast-evolving realities in the supply movement. This week, you will have negotiated the tensions within the financing landscape and glimpsed the wealth of insight and power the right data can unlock. We will have presented to you the exciting implications of platforms and resources including the VAN, LEAP, and the COMPASS research. And we will have discussed pressing issues such as the regionalization of supply chains and pandemic preparedness. The Coalition brain trust curated and managed these critical discussions this week. We are at the confluence of these global conversations and are poised to play a significant leadership role in shaping these issues in the years to come.

We are privileged to have in this community so many leaders who have dedicated their vision and commitment and I want to acknowledge them. As I look around the room, I see the badges of Strategy Ambassadors who have pledged to support our Strategy Re-Design. Likewise, I spot our Supply Fellows, members of our flagship career mentorship initiative. And I see our VAN Ambassadors who celebrate and promote this unique data platform and community. To all our Ambassadors — whether you wear a badge or not — we appreciate you and rely on your intrepid leadership to see us through into a bright future.

In its 19th year, the Coalition continues to do what we do best:

• We leverage catalytic investments into groundbreaking outcomes.
• We champion research, investigation, and thought leadership.
• We seek and provide the evidence and the data for supplies-related decision-making

And above all, we seek to be of service to our members in everything we do.